Chapter 4
Of what sort of Proof the Principle of Utility is Susceptible.

IT HAS already been remarked,
that questions of ultimate ends do not admit of proof, in the ordinary
acceptation of the term. To be incapable of proof by reasoning is common to all
first principles; to the first premises of our knowledge, as well as to those
of our conduct. But the former, being matters of fact, may be the subject of a
direct appeal to the faculties which judge of fact — namely, our senses,
and our internal consciousness. Can an appeal be made to the same faculties on
questions of practical ends? Or by what other faculty is cognisance taken of
them?

Questions about ends are, in other words, questions what things are
desirable. The utilitarian doctrine is, that happiness is desirable, and the
only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only desirable as means
to that end. What ought to be required of this doctrine — what conditions
is it requisite that the doctrine should fulfil — to make good its claim
to be believed?

The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that
people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible, is that people
hear it: and so of the other sources of our experience. In like manner, I
apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is
desirable, is that people do actually desire it. If the end which the
utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in practice,
acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was
so. No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that
each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own
happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which
the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is
a good: that each person's happiness is a good to that person, and the general
happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons. Happiness has
made out its title as one of the ends of conduct, and consequently one of the
criteria of morality.

But it has not, by this alone, proved itself to be the sole criterion. To do
that, it would seem, by the same rule, necessary to show, not only that people
desire happiness, but that they never desire anything else. Now it is palpable
that they do desire things which, in common language, are decidedly
distinguished from happiness. They desire, for example, virtue, and the absence
of vice, no less really than pleasure and the absence of pain. The desire of
virtue is not as universal, but it is as authentic a fact, as the desire of
happiness. And hence the opponents of the utilitarian standard deem that they
have a right to infer that there are other ends of human action besides
happiness, and that happiness is not the standard of approbation and
disapprobation.

But does the utilitarian doctrine deny that people desire virtue, or
maintain that virtue is not a thing to be desired? The very reverse. It
maintains not only that virtue is to be desired, but that it is to be desired
disinterestedly, for itself. Whatever may be the opinion of utilitarian
moralists as to the original conditions by which virtue is made virtue; however
they may believe (as they do) that actions and dispositions are only virtuous
because they promote another end than virtue; yet this being granted, and it
having been decided, from considerations of this description, what is virtuous,
they not only place virtue at the very head of the things which are good as
means to the ultimate end, but they also recognise as a psychological fact the
possibility of its being, to the individual, a good in itself, without looking
to any end beyond it; and hold, that the mind is not in a right state, not in a
state conformable to Utility, not in the state most conducive to the general
happiness, unless it does love virtue in this manner — as a thing
desirable in itself, even although, in the individual instance, it should not
produce those other desirable consequences which it tends to produce, and on
account of which it is held to be virtue. This opinion is not, in the smallest
degree, a departure from the Happiness principle. The ingredients of happiness
are very various, and each of them is desirable in itself, and not merely when
considered as swelling an aggregate. The principle of utility does not mean
that any given pleasure, as music, for instance, or any given exemption from
pain, as for example health, is to be looked upon as means to a collective
something termed happiness, and to be desired on that account. They are desired
and desirable in and for themselves; besides being means, they are a part of
the end. Virtue, according to the utilitarian doctrine, is not naturally and
originally part of the end, but it is capable of becoming so; and in those who
love it disinterestedly it has become so, and is desired and cherished, not as
a means to happiness, but as a part of their happiness.

To illustrate this farther, we may remember that virtue is not the only
thing, originally a means, and which if it were not a means to anything else,
would be and remain indifferent, but which by association with what it is a
means to, comes to be desired for itself, and that too with the utmost
intensity. What, for example, shall we say of the love of money? There is
nothing originally more desirable about money than about any heap of glittering
pebbles. Its worth is solely that of the things which it will buy; the desires
for other things than itself, which it is a means of gratifying. Yet the love
of money is not only one of the strongest moving forces of human life, but
money is, in many cases, desired in and for itself; the desire to possess it is
often stronger than the desire to use it, and goes on increasing when all the
desires which point to ends beyond it, to be compassed by it, are falling off.
It may, then, be said truly, that money is desired not for the sake of an end,
but as part of the end. From being a means to happiness, it has come to be
itself a principal ingredient of the individual's conception of happiness. The
same may be said of the majority of the great objects of human life —
power, for example, or fame; except that to each of these there is a certain
amount of immediate pleasure annexed, which has at least the semblance of being
naturally inherent in them; a thing which cannot be said of money. Still,
however, the strongest natural attraction, both of power and of fame, is the
immense aid they give to the attainment of our other wishes; and it is the
strong association thus generated between them and all our objects of desire,
which gives to the direct desire of them the intensity it often assumes, so as
in some characters to surpass in strength all other desires. In these cases the
means have become a part of the end, and a more important part of it than any
of the things which they are means to. What was once desired as an instrument
for the attainment of happiness, has come to be desired for its own sake. In
being desired for its own sake it is, however, desired as part of happiness.
The person is made, or thinks he would be made, happy by its mere possession;
and is made unhappy by failure to obtain it. The desire of it is not a
different thing from the desire of happiness, any more than the love of music,
or the desire of health. They are included in happiness. They are some of the
elements of which the desire of happiness is made up. Happiness is not an
abstract idea, but a concrete whole; and these are some of its parts. And the
utilitarian standard sanctions and approves their being so. Life would be a
poor thing, very ill provided with sources of happiness, if there were not this
provision of nature, by which things originally indifferent, but conducive to,
or otherwise associated with, the satisfaction of our primitive desires, become
in themselves sources of pleasure more valuable than the primitive pleasures,
both in permanency, in the space of human existence that they are capable of
covering, and even in intensity.

Virtue, according to the utilitarian conception, is a good of this
description. There was no original desire of it, or motive to it, save its
conduciveness to pleasure, and especially to protection from pain. But through
the association thus formed, it may be felt a good in itself, and desired as
such with as great intensity as any other good; and with this difference
between it and the love of money, of power, or of fame, that all of these may,
and often do, render the individual noxious to the other members of the society
to which he belongs, whereas there is nothing which makes him so much a
blessing to them as the cultivation of the disinterested love of virtue. And
consequently, the utilitarian standard, while it tolerates and approves those
other acquired desires, up to the point beyond which they would be more
injurious to the general happiness than promotive of it, enjoins and requires
the cultivation of the love of virtue up to the greatest strength possible, as
being above all things important to the general happiness.

It results from the preceding considerations, that there is in reality
nothing desired except happiness. Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means
to some end beyond itself, and ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a
part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it has become so. Those
who desire virtue for its own sake, desire it either because the consciousness
of it is a pleasure, or because the consciousness of being without it is a
pain, or for both reasons united; as in truth the pleasure and pain seldom
exist separately, but almost always together, the same person feeling pleasure
in the degree of virtue attained, and pain in not having attained more. If one
of these gave him no pleasure, and the other no pain, he would not love or
desire virtue, or would desire it only for the other benefits which it might
produce to himself or to persons whom he cared for. We have now, then, an
answer to the question, of what sort of proof the principle of utility is
susceptible. If the opinion which I have now stated is psychologically true
— if human nature is so constituted as to desire nothing which is not
either a part of happiness or a means of happiness, we can have no other proof,
and we require no other, that these are the only things desirable. If so,
happiness is the sole end of human action, and the promotion of it the test by
which to judge of all human conduct; from whence it necessarily follows that it
must be the criterion of morality, since a part is included in the whole.

And now to decide whether this is really so; whether mankind do desire
nothing for itself but that which is a pleasure to them, or of which the
absence is a pain; we have evidently arrived at a question of fact and
experience, dependent, like all similar questions, upon evidence. It can only
be determined by practised self-consciousness and self-observation, assisted by
observation of others. I believe that these sources of evidence, impartially
consulted, will declare that desiring a thing and finding it pleasant, aversion
to it and thinking of it as painful, are phenomena entirely inseparable, or
rather two parts of the same phenomenon; in strictness of language, two
different modes of naming the same psychological fact: that to think of an
object as desirable (unless for the sake of its consequences), and to think of
it as pleasant, are one and the same thing; and that to desire anything, except
in proportion as the idea of it is pleasant, is a physical and metaphysical
impossibility.

So obvious does this appear to me, that I expect it will hardly be disputed:
and the objection made will be, not that desire can possibly be directed to
anything ultimately except pleasure and exemption from pain, but that the will
is a different thing from desire; that a person of confirmed virtue, or any
other person whose purposes are fixed, carries out his purposes without any
thought of the pleasure he has in contemplating them, or expects to derive from
their fulfilment; and persists in acting on them, even though these pleasures
are much diminished, by changes in his character or decay of his passive
sensibilities, or are outweighed by the pains which the pursuit of the purposes
may bring upon him. All this I fully admit, and have stated it elsewhere, as
positively and emphatically as any one. Will, the active phenomenon, is a
different thing from desire, the state of passive sensibility, and though
originally an offshoot from it, may in time take root and detach itself from
the parent stock; so much so, that in the case of an habitual purpose, instead
of willing the thing because we desire it, we often desire it only because we
will it. This, however, is but an instance of that familiar fact, the power of
habit, and is nowise confined to the case of virtuous actions. Many indifferent
things, which men originally did from a motive of some sort, they continue to
do from habit. Sometimes this is done unconsciously, the consciousness coming
only after the action: at other times with conscious volition, but volition
which has become habitual, and is put in operation by the force of habit, in
opposition perhaps to the deliberate preference, as often happens with those
who have contracted habits of vicious or hurtful indulgence.

Third and last comes the case in which the habitual act of will in the
individual instance is not in contradiction to the general intention prevailing
at other times, but in fulfilment of it; as in the case of the person of
confirmed virtue, and of all who pursue deliberately and consistently any
determinate end. The distinction between will and desire thus understood is an
authentic and highly important psychological fact; but the fact consists solely
in this — that will, like all other parts of our constitution, is amenable
to habit, and that we may will from habit what we no longer desire for itself
or desire only because we will it. It is not the less true that will, in the
beginning, is entirely produced by desire; including in that term the repelling
influence of pain as well as the attractive one of pleasure. Let us take into
consideration, no longer the person who has a confirmed will to do right, but
him in whom that virtuous will is still feeble, conquerable by temptation, and
not to be fully relied on; by what means can it be strengthened? How can the
will to be virtuous, where it does not exist in sufficient force, be implanted
or awakened? Only by making the person desire virtue — by making him think
of it in a pleasurable light, or of its absence in a painful one. It is by
associating the doing right with pleasure, or the doing wrong with pain, or by
eliciting and impressing and bringing home to the person's experience the
pleasure naturally involved in the one or the pain in the other, that it is
possible to call forth that will to be virtuous, which, when confirmed, acts
without any thought of either pleasure or pain. Will is the child of desire,
and passes out of the dominion of its parent only to come under that of habit.
That which is the result of habit affords no presumption of being intrinsically
good; and there would be no reason for wishing that the purpose of virtue
should become independent of pleasure and pain, were it not that the influence
of the pleasurable and painful associations which prompt to virtue is not
sufficiently to be depended on for unerring constancy of action until it has
acquired the support of habit. Both in feeling and in conduct, habit is the
only thing which imparts certainty; and it is because of the importance to
others of being able to rely absolutely on one's feelings and conduct, and to
oneself of being able to rely on one's own, that the will to do right ought to
be cultivated into this habitual independence. In other words, this state of
the will is a means to good, not intrinsically a good; and does not contradict
the doctrine that nothing is a good to human beings but in so far as it is
either itself pleasurable, or a means of attaining pleasure or averting pain.

But if this doctrine be true, the principle of utility is proved. Whether it
is so or not, must now be left to the consideration of the thoughtful reader.